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elsietee wrote:Kelly Maixner says he's "retired" because he doesn't actually own any dogs [I will try and find out who's dogs he's running].
Kelly Maixner tried to mute the call of the wild, but he couldn't.
"Oh, you know. It's an addiction," he said.
A dentist from Chugiak, Maixner started six Iditarods and finished as high as 13th before selling his dogs to John Baker and Katherine Keith in 2016. Now he's back with a bunch of dogs borrowed from famous mushers.
"Lance, Dallas, Mitch, Cim Smyth, Ray Redington," he said, ticking off the names of mushers who loaned him dogs. (This being Alaska, where Iditarod winners are state treasures, last names are not necessary when talking about famous dog drivers.)
Maixner signed up for this year's race an hour before the registration deadline. "I had no for-sure dogs at the time," he said.
But he picked up a dog here, a dog there, and then one day in January while buying dog food he met four-time champion Lance Mackey for the first time.
Mackey, a cancer survivor, scratched from the 2016 Iditarod and skipped last year's and this year's races for health reasons, but he still runs dogs.
"I got a whole team that's trained," Mackey told Maixner, and at the beginning of February, a dozen Mackey-trained dogs began training with Maixner.
"I wasn't going to be able to run them, and they deserve to go," Mackey said.
Sixteen dogs per team is too many, said Fairbanks musher Lance Mackey, the only racer to win four Iditarods in a row. "If I had to change one thing, I would make it more old-school," Mackey said. "You're allowed one sled, start to finish. You're allowed maybe a 12-dog pool and you're only allowed to drop three dogs."
On the Iditarod trail, Lanier has broken ankles, ruptured his Achilles tendon, broken his clavicle, cracked his ribs, caught pneumonia and frostbit two fingers and a toe, leading to amputations.
"It's a contact sport. I have contacted a lot of things," he said. "So I'm gradually, slowly but surely, disappearing as I go down the trail."
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